Parson’s Conference to Explore Fashion and Jewelry

November 20, 2006byCarrie Soucy

In the past nine years, I’ve covered my fair share (and then some) of jewelry conferences. They usually involve the same roster of speakers, and almost always focus on sales techniques, updates from the diamond world, or retail trends in areas like merchandising or marketing. All valid and necessary but, honestly, after a while, they sometimes start to blur together. It is important to keep up-to-date on this industry-insider sort of knowledge, but how often do we explore the horizon? (Especially given how the industry’s horizon has been changing in the past decade)

“the interplay between fashion and jewelry or precious stones—in the latter case, diamonds in particular—on the cutting edge artistic expressions by legendary houses such asHarry Winston,Tiffany & Co., andGraff; by mining companies now in the retail world, such asDeBeers; by individual artists working in the studio tradition, among them young jewelers such as Lola Brooks; and by fashion designers includingDiane Von Furstenburg.”

No, you won’t walk away with a laundry list of in-store to dos. Instead, it offers three days of inspiration through the exploration of fashion and its interplay with jewelry. Seems to me, with all those other conferences preparing us for the traditional jewelry retailing side of things, this is precisely the kind of inspiration we all need to achieve the stylish fashion retailing stature to which the industry is aspiring.